


Fire, Water, Earth, Air

by VioletArroyo



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: All About The Character Interactions, Angst and Feels, Archetypes, Canon Compliant, Canon Temporary Character Death, Character Study, Complicated Relationships, Elements, F/F, F/M, Gen, Implied Relationships, Interweaving relationships, M/M, Most slashes are also &'s, Multi, No Dialogue, Non-Linear Narrative, Other, POV Second Person, Past Relationship(s), Platonic Relationships, Platonic Romance, Romantic Friendship, The &'s are NOT slashes, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, slightly meta, switches between authoral voice and character voice without warning!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-04
Updated: 2015-06-04
Packaged: 2018-04-02 19:13:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4071400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VioletArroyo/pseuds/VioletArroyo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's as simple as the four basic elements. Or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fire, Water, Earth, Air

**Author's Note:**

> Of course I don't own them, Joss does, and the money I don't make is all his, but since he doesn't seem to object to other people playing in his sandbox and transforming his castles per their own tastes, just call me a remodeler.

***

You remember falling asleep in the courtyard, to wake with your hand aflame. You remember shoving the same hand into the light, singeing yourself to impress your new goddess's god. You remember her, dark and glittering like crude oil, carrying you, barely aware, broken like a charred stick,out of a collapsing pile of kindling which had been a church. You remember racing around under a smoking blanket and puffing ashy haze next to a tree to catch a glimpse of a lighter goddess's tanned skin. You remember blocking blow after blow from fists like torches and blackening skin on a crucifix; you were never afraid of a little barbeque in the name of love. You remember sharing tar-laced breaths and then fury-fueled fists with a windier version, so hard to get a hold on, of your earthy sunshine girl. You'll have a new memory in a few months of another crucifix and your anger flaring so hot you won't even care about the grayness rising from the chimney of your hands. You'll remember soon this is different, this is numb. You'll remember you're scared and these aren't your friends and family; they're his. You remember being down there, channeling the sun itself through your body and soul, lit up like a bleeding roman candle. 

You describe the amulet's immolation as your eyeballs popping and your organs baking. You want him to feel it, you want all their condescending faces to recognize it, you want them all to know how you burned, just how bloody awful it felt, don't want him to know you laughed as you boiled all the while. You don't want him to know how your wicked plum was right and there really were burning baby fishes swimming all around your head as you cooked down there. You finally felt something radiant, something luminescent, something effulgent. And now there's nothing. You're cold, but you can't even feel your own flesh. You can't smell the air, can't taste the fusing chemicals their skins shed into it. You can see them and hear them, but they may as well not be here. You may as well not be here. You cover with fiery words. You shield yourself behind heated rage, searing him with binary blue stars, staring at him in a nuclear conflagration of impotency. You didn't plan on returning, but he's blaming you. You didn't want to do anything but ground yourself in her moonstone eyes just one last time before hell's fires claimed you. He can't give you even that. He's cool as the ocean and even colder than those depths. You want him to be the one to burn, but all you can do is make him steam.

***

You remember standing on the cliff, waiting for her, watching the tide move under the stars. You remember the rushing sound of the deep. You remember the millions of tons of liquid pressing down onto the metal coffin he sealed you in. You remember the fish and other creatures which swam past. You remember the coherency of the waves, even at the bottom of them, as you rested atop drenched earth. You remember how it was almost peaceful, almost floating in the most ancient of aquatic wombs, before hunger, thirst, made you stop seeing anything outside your own rippling mind. You remember how on the surface his eyes were the same color as the rolling fluid, but then they became just as black as the fathomless depths he sunk you down. You remember how the sea swallowed you both, because he never really came back from the dead pool, until you had him made anew.

You don't know if it was wet the day you were born. It's not something god-fearing Irishmen remember to tell their sons, seeing as Poseidon only holds dominion over pagan, unsaved souls. But Galway is near the Atlantic, river rushing out to sea. The rain came down in buckets as your son's other creator ended herself to make his rage into being. The storm bellowed, wind whipping around your skins, as another lost soul cried out for help, her heart sinking in the guilt of a sin she could not undo. It poured when the purest of souls gave you a love so complete it ripped you away from her solid shores in a tidal wave of consequences. It was frozen as she cried, salty as black dirt, and those on high decided you weren't done yet. And now it's so hot and the fight so intense, even your cold blood is boiling. The alley may as well be made of water there's so much of it, as you look over at your kindred soul and watch it hit his skin and steam, watch it slide off of him like oil, like the fingers of the crazy girl who might have been a saint until you spoiled her. His eyes are blue, too, but there's not a drop of the sea in them, just the sky alight with a flame which never seems to die. You wonder if that's what she saw in them, the girl who is your sweet earthy memory, and if he's what lit her whole dark world for a while. He cocks that damn eyebrow and slides a stolen sword into another demon before tossing it to you, the hilt warm from his hand, to replace the one you lost in a puddle the size of an ocean.

***

You remember staring in the mirror after you took your body back from a raging tornado of a girl you hated so much because you were scared she was a part of you. You remember you were afraid she'd erode away every grain of sand you covered your bottle-blonde girly self in. You remember wondering if your eyes looked like granite and that's why your white knight hit you to save her, if that's why your Iowa boy couldn't tell the difference between the two of you, since you were a blank gray stone next to her blank gray sky. You remember the quaking ground under your feet at sixteen, going to face death in a cavern as if this was something every person had to do. You remember drowning again and again, and the surety and solidity of finding yourself once again standing on an even surface, the irony of wearing heels to hold yourself a just a little further above it making you quip as if your lungs were made of rock, not air. You'll remember, though you don't know it yet, climbing into the bowels of the planet to heal her gaping wound once and for all, to fill in the cracks with the concrete of your conviction. You remember, most of all at the moment, the feel of the soil as you shoved your way past it, ripped away from peace, back into a box six feet deep.

She helped you scrub the dirt from under your nails and off your skin, but the water went cold before you could clean the grave from yourself completely. He sees it, standing beneath you, your gut screaming the ever-present tingly of “evil, evil, kill it, destroy it,” but the house is dark because the light was nothing like the soothing shadow of the ground you'd been buried in, the sky your soul had found orbit within, and the forever-stuck-in-the-eighties bleached head of his shines like a torch, so you couldn't look away, even if you wanted to. His eyes glow, too. He never did need to go into vamp-face, those sickly yellow orbs, in order to have fiery eyes and you're not sure why the flicker of thought makes you wince and long for a nice cool, grassy lawn to sink down onto. Whereas the other, the first demon you let close, for reasons so very different, his eyes were liquid. Even if you called them chocolate, they were the melted version, flowing and oozing and just generally something you wanted to drown in. You always felt like he would wash you away in a tidal wave of love. With this one you always feel like he'll clear cut you with the efficiency of a truly Southern California wildfire, blown even further by the wind, until nothing but scorched earth remains. But your soles are descending the steps and he's moving up to meet you.

***

You remember your first time, or at least the first time you actually initiated sex, and the way you felt like you were floating away on the most awesome breeze. You remember the freedom of it, no limits, whipping past boundaries like a gale-force of will. You remember flying like the wind across country to escape one ugly-ass old demon, thinking you could beat him at his own game, thinking maybe this other girl could stop your flight like a brick wall. You remember dancing crazy with her, flinging yourselves around like helium balloons above the floor, gliding like birds through gaps in the wires. You remember how she was hard as a boulder, but she came away in your hands like crumbs of dirt until little bits of her were stuck throughout you and no matter how hard you shook, you couldn't shake off the smog of doubt she filled you with. You remember trying to kiss her man, to sweep him away with you, turn him into your kind of hurricane. You remember, most of all though, the way the wind rushed past your ears as you fell off the roof, the way you could feel the atmosphere itself pressing against you as if it could slow your descent, the way you wondered at the blood arcing away from your gut into the sky as you watched it soar by above you.

You're sleeping now, but you're sure it's going to end soon. This place is full of dirt, but that's her, and it's full of rain, but that's him, and there's smoke in the distance and you have no idea who that is, but he's probably one hell of a hot guy. You think there's a night of rain and tears in an alley where you can't draw enough oxygen into your lungs to make yourself believe there's a reason to keep breathing, but somehow the storm, the weight of water those clouds carry, is going to save you. You see an explosion blowing you like a leaf in the wind across a sewer and hear the sound of it like pressure all around you, but you're sure it can't be right, because you're not the one who belongs in the earth. You see a man on fire and feel a pang of too little time to have known him, but you don't even know him, even if you're sure you know what the air which feeds those flames tastes like and those hot chemicals reside far too close to home for comfort. There's too many things which haven't happened yet, which you won't remember yet. But, there're voices whispering like the soft wisps of a baby's gasps and they're all telling you it's time to wake up and face the music. You're pretty sure it's the only way you're going to find out which direction this draft is coming from, so you do.

**Author's Note:**

> Phew! So, this is my first ever story/post in the Buffyverse. Please be kind. I am unbeta'd and while I'm an English and Creative Writing major who has proofread this until she's blue in the face, mistakes can and do happen. You can lay it all on me.
> 
> I've spent the better part of the last two years searching through the backlog of Buffy fic that can be found online and I couldn't find this idea out there anywhere when it occurred to me a few months ago. It wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it. So I did. It's more "tell" than "show" because it's all about what each of them is thinking at a specific moment in time. Coming VERY late to this fandom, I realize I might have a different take on things than others who've been here for years. I apologize if my interpretation of the characters doesn't meet others'. Certain character relationships are open to platonic, het or slash interpretation, just like Joss made them, so make of that what you will.


End file.
